Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge by authors_sort Page B

tell him so—or let him know exactly how much I cared about him.
    I kept staring at Owen, and he looked right back at me, not saying anything. Up to me to get the ball rolling then.
    I sighed. “Okay. Let me have it. I know you’re angry. Your eyes are practically glowing with it. Jo-Jo called you, I take it, and told you about my little adventure?”
    Owen gave me the hard stare a moment longer before nodding. “She did. What I really want to know is what the hell were you thinking, going after Mab by yourself? We’ve talked about this, Gin. We’ve all decided that it’s too dangerous.”
    The
we
in question being myself, Owen, Finn, the Deveraux sisters, and my sister, Detective Bria Coolidge. All of us had a vested interest in seeing Mab dead. We just couldn’t figure out how to make it happen without all of us going down in flames with her.
    “I know,” I snapped. “But I’m tired of hiding from Mab and her minions. I’m tired of worrying what she might do to Bria. I want the bitch dead.”
    Owen wasn’t the only one who was angry. I felt it too, sinking its hot, gnashing teeth into my heart, along with the rest of the emotional termites. Most of it was directed at myself because I’d missed last night. But part of it was because I was scared too—scared of how much it had meant to wake up and see Owen sitting next to my bed. We’d been together for a few months now, but it always surprised me just how very much I cared abouthim, especially when I’d been so badly burned by a previous lover.
    Owen was far more important to me than he realized—so important that it frightened me a little bit. Okay, a whole hell of a lot. Enough to make me want to keep him at arm’s length, even though I knew it was too late for that. Too many people that I’d loved over the years had been murdered for me to easily open up my heart to others. My mother, my older sister, Fletcher. All dead and gone before their time—all because of me and my mistakes.
    Somehow, Owen had stormed his way into my heart whether I’d wanted him there or not, and now I’d do anything to keep him safe—even sacrifice myself like I almost had last night on my self-imposed quest.
    “I don’t see why you care so much anyway,” I muttered in a harsher, colder voice than I would have liked. “It was my ass on the line last night, not yours. I made sure of that.”
    Owen’s eyes narrowed, his jaw clenched, and his arms tightened across his chest. “Why? Why do I care so much, Gin? Because I—”
    He bit off his words, but they hung in the air between us like a ghost, writhing and twisting, just like my heart was right now.
    Because I love you
. That’s what he’d been about to say. The shock of his almost uttering the words drove the air from my lungs. Owen—loved me? Really? Truly? I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t know what to make of anything anymore—especially not the softness for him that had wormed its way down into the deepest, darkest,blackest part of my heart. Into my very
soul
, even. If I hadn’t killed it long ago by being the Spider.
    Owen looked away and drew in a breath. “Because I care about you, Gin. That’s why. I don’t want you going off on a suicide mission to try to kill Mab. I’d rather have you alive any day than her dead, even if she did murder your family and my parents.”
    I wasn’t Mab’s only victim. Far from it. Part of the reason Owen understood my obsession with killing the Fire elemental was that she’d murdered his parents when he’d been a teenager. Mab had burned Owen’s house to the ground because of a gambling debt that his father owed, killing his parents in the process, and leaving him homeless and to fend for himself and his sister, Eva, who’d been little more than a baby then.
    “Better me go by myself than drag the rest of you down with me,” I pointed out in a quiet voice. “And you know that’s what would have happened. Mab is too well protected at her estate